


From Your Lips, It Seemed It Might Come True

by JellyDishes



Category: Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Comes Back Wrong, F/M, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-09 11:57:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20853047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JellyDishes/pseuds/JellyDishes
Summary: Tsurin Tabris' death burns away everything Jasper Hawke has, until all that is left is a wish. Three words, but not the three words he would say to her, if he could: bring her back.





	From Your Lips, It Seemed It Might Come True

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are always deeply appreciated and welcome. I respond to every one, but please have patience with me and my anxiety

She never left him, except once.

Tsurin Tabris had fallen backwards into Jasper Hawke’s life the way her laughter tumbled end over end, surprising even her. Crinkled eyes and a fisted hand held in front of a wheezing grin, as if to hold back what they both knew would happen next. But they hadn’t.

As invincible as Tsurin had always seemed, looming higher than her small stature suggested, no one was immune to the archdemon’s flames. His beloved had gone up like a chantry candle left for the dead, leaving nothing behind but smoldering armor, and everything. The Tsurin shaped whole in the world gaped wide and raw, and every day he stumbled through the joyous celebrations, it throbbed that much more. Sometimes he felt sick with it, dazed and lost with a fever that wasn’t, or with the overwhelming fury that swamped over him in waves any time someone used her title instead of her name. Put her in a box the way no one had never been capable of doing to her in life.

So it should have come as no surprise to anyone that he didn’t turn to the Maker, the way Tsurin’s father had hoped. Drawn and shrunken in his grief, Cyrion Tabris hadn’t been able to hold Jasper’s gaze. Only looked away and croaked to get out his house. That he wouldn’t bury two children.

No, he went down darker paths, instead. Sought out mages in the hidden places of the world who could teach him the spells he needed. He had had to do things to prove himself to them, but it didn’t matter. One more step, one more day, one more dream before she came back.

The ritual went off without a hitch, or so it seemed. He stood in the center of symbols gouged into the rock he stood upon and yelled her name into the wind.

When he was done, he slept.

Sometimes, he thought he woke up.

Sometimes he caught glimpses of her. Tsurin’s previously beautiful brown skin twisted and cracked like dried earth or overcooked meat, so that all he could see of her was the angry red glow from between the cracks in her skin.

She never spoke, except in a rumbling, crashing groan that built and built until he realized as it crested in an unbearable shriek, that the sound was the archdemon’s.

She never left him, not once. She didn’t have to, not when his skin felt hot enough to the touch that he twisted under a flame that burned him out from the inside. “Soon,” he rasped into red and orange traverses of fire in the dark that might have suggested a face. “Please wait for me, wait.”

Poor lad, the alienage’s apothecary murmured to a drawn and shrunken elf. Infection’s taking him. You can just feel the heat radiating off his skin, can’t you?


End file.
